SOUTHINGTON — A tiny scarlet chili pepper that's so hot it's used in India to stop wandering elephants and is being studied by the U.S. military for use as a weapon are for sale at the Lewis Educational Agricultural Farm.

The pinky-sized peppers don't look like trouble as crooked splashes of red in their pots at the LEAF farm greenhouse. But don't be fooled.

The bhut jolokia pepper, also known as the ghost pepper, is from northwest India. Like poisonous tropical frogs, they're brightly colored but dangerous.

"It's incrediably hot," farmer Mark Ramsay said. The ghost pepper is one of more than 24 pepper varieties he grows on his 7-acre farm. He sells individual ghost peppers for a dollar, mostly at farm markets, but warns shoppers about them.

The ghost pepper was certified in 2007 as the world's hottest pepper, rated at 1.01 million Scoville Heat Units, which measures the amount of chemicals that produce heat. It had that rank for several years before new varieties bumped it to third place.

"If someone tells you, 'Try this pepper. It's sweet.' Be careful," said Matt Theriault, one of Ramsay's lead workers. "It might be a trick. You can't tell by looking."

Diane Kirby, co-owner of Southern New England Spice Co. in Hadley, Mass., sells dried ghost chili powder. It's the only one of the 185 products the company sells that includes a warning on its label.

"Fifteen years ago when we started, it was unusual to sell hot and spicy stuff," she said. "We started selling ghost pepper powder six years ago after some of our restaurants kept asking for it. Immigrants are teaching us how to eat and use spices."

The price of ghost pepper powder used to be $14 for 7 ounces, she said, but now it's $26. That's because the U.S. military has been buying a lot of ghost peppers in an effort to make a more potent pepper spray, she said.

"We wear masks when we pack ghost pepper powder. We always wash our hands, but I end up trying the powder every time we pack it. It gets into the air. Your eyes water for hours," she said. "A lot of people don't realize how hot this product is."

Kirby said a friend told her about a trip to Asia where he saw a traveler boast that he could tolerate hot peppers, buy a fresh ghost pepper from a vendor and ate it. The vendor was horrified. "She was yelling no, no, no. The man swallowed it, then passed out," Kirby said.

At the LEAF farm, Ramsay tells workers to approach the ripe peppers with caution and reminds them constantly to wash after picking and don't touch their eyes.

The warnings didn't stop a few young workers from trying to eat some, a ghost pepper, Ramsay said. Picker Matt Tattersall took a bite and, as can be seen in a YouTube video, within 10 seconds is gagging. He couldn't talk, turned bright red, sweated, teared up and was feeble for more than an hour.

Another year, three farm workers decided to try ghost peppers. Ramsay said he couldn't talk them out of it. Same result.

In the last few years, the ghost pepper has been surpassed on the Scoville scale by several new varieties. The Chili Pepper Institute at the New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, now places the ghost pepper in third place, slightly less incendiary than the Butch T Scorpion at 1.4 million Scoville units and the new nuclear pepper, the Carolina Reaper, rated at 1.56 million Scoville units.

Mike Truss, owner of the Napoli Café in Southington's Plantsville section, uses powdered ghost peppers when making his hottest sauce for chicken wings. Not many people order it.

"This is meant to hurt you. It's really hot," Truss said. "When I learned to cook in school years ago, the hottest thing around was the habanero. Now there's no comparision."